Now Hiring: Armpit Sniffers & Dinosaur Duster

We talk about Job Titles a lot and with good reason – they are important. A key take-away regarding job descriptions is that clear, direct language beats flowery, fancy language every time.

It’s simple from a company’s perspective - you want to maximize the probability that your job will show up in front of applicants, when and where, they are searching for it. “Receptionist” will trump “Director of First Impressions” every time.

But sometimes, and for some jobs, there’s only so much Job Title optimization you can do.

Recently, The Guardian published a slide show titled, "The World’s Oddest Jobs – in Pictures." The slideshow is a summary of a book titled “Odd Jobs” by photo essayist Nancy Rica Schiff from the early 2000’s.

Some of the more interesting job titles that Ms. Schiff captured in images include:

• Odour judge – daily tests measuring the smells emitted by various body parts and products (armpits, breath, feet, cat litter, etc.).
• Golf Ball Diver – all of those bad shots lead to a nice secondary business – refinished golf balls. And someone needs to get them from the bottom of the water hazards. Jeffrey Bliem is one such person and at the time of the posting, was recovering 5,000 golf balls per day.
• Artificial Inseminator – artificially inseminating cows – and achieving a 65-70% pregnancy rate?!?
• Dinosaur duster – someone has to clean the bones at the Smithsonian – maybe you could be the next Frank Braisted!

We wondered how these jobs would fare in today’s online world so we searched each job title, using the exact phrase in quotations on Indeed.com. Sadly, none of the above titles yielded any results.

Even though the above jobs likely won’t be your next career move, we recommend checking out the original book and you can find it on Amazon here.

Posted by Patrick Clark on November 14, 2013 Share